Angelos Sikelianos: Selected Poems: No. 15 - Softcover

Keeley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9607120124 ISBN 13: 9789607120120

Publisher: Denise Harvey, 2009

Synopsis

Angelos Sikelianos (1884-1951) is generally recognized as the most important Greek poet between Cavafy and Seferis. This selection of his poetry, first published by Princeton University Press almost thirty years ago, still remains the only collection in English in volume form; both the English and Greek texts of this present edition have been amended. Included in here are works from the full range of the poet's career and in his several voices -- those of the lyricist, the narrator, the seer.

The volume also offers samples of the poet's varied forms, from sonnets to longer narrative and reflective poems, each rendered in a metrical equivalent. An introduction outlines the principal stages of the poet's development as thinker and craftsman in relation to the particular translations included.

For Sikelianos everything in the natural and visible world, when rightly perceived, is an expression of a supernatural and invisible order of reality. The task of the prophet, sage and poet is to reconcile the one world with the other, to heal the dichotomy between them through an act of creative mediation. With this in mind, Sikelianos uses myth not as a rhetorical device but as a mode for revealing the eternal divinities that inhabit the physical world. In his late poems, myth becomes the agency for uniting his subjective and narrative voices into a sublime tragic vision.

About this title

Review:

The present selection of Sikelianos's poetry . . . approaches, perhaps to the greatest degree possible, the rhythm and power of the Greek original. --Thanassis Maskaleris, The Hellenic Journal

The translators beautifully capture the numinous and heroic quality of the poet.
--Mary Renault

About the Author:

Born in Crete in 1911, Odysseus Elytis started publishing his poetry in the 1930s. In 1940-41 he took part in the campaign against the Italian fascists in Albania, and during the Nazi occupation he was one of the most prominent poets of the Greek resistance. The Nobel Prize was awarded to him `for his poetry, which against the background of Greek tradition, depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clearsightedness modern man's struggle for freedom and creativeness.'

About this edition

• Publisher: Denise Harvey
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 9607120124
• ISBN 13: 9789607120120
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 172